by Simon Francis Gaine OP

Many of you will have heard of the death of Fergus Kerr OP, the Scottish Dominican friar and theologian, and past President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain (1990-92), who died on 23^rd November 2025, aged 94, at St Albert’s Priory, Edinburgh. He was and still is indisputably a major influence in British theology. I first encountered him through his acclaimed Theology after Wittgenstein, which I was directed to read a total of three times during my undergraduate education in the late eighties. My non-Catholic teachers were keen to present Fergus’s characteristically unCartesian work as an argument for the necessity of the Church.

I met Fergus in person in 1994 when I travelled to Edinburgh, where he was prior, for interviews towards being accepted into the Dominicans. I already knew his reputation as a solid and reliable figure of few words, who had remained steady as prior in Oxford and loyal to community prayer during a time when many friars left the religious life, and to whom the English Province owed much of its survival. Before my first visit to Edinburgh, I had been humorously warned by an Oxford friar that ‘you always remember the first thing Fergus didn’t say to you.’ Only later on did I discover that Fergus rather enjoyed the reputation of being ‘the strong, silent type’, as he himself put it.

Rev Dr Simon Francis Gaine OP is President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain

A short obituary may be found at the English Dominican website https://english.op.org/latest-news/fr-fergus-kerr-op/.

The Daily Telegraph carried an obituary by CTA member John Haldane on 1^st January:  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/12/31/fergus-kerr-dominicans-theology-aquinas-wittgenstein/.

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Photograph courtesy of St Albert's Catholic Chaplaincy, Edinburgh: Fr Fergus Kerr OP being awarded Doctor of Divinity by the University of Edinburgh in a private graduation ceremony held in the Raeburn Room in Old College, 9th December 2019